1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mobile communication network and, more particularly, to accessing local services pertaining to a geographic location of a mobile station.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various service announcements can be transmitted to mobile stations on the basis of a service request of a subscriber in mobile communication systems. Generally, these services are most often arranged to be provided from outside the actual mobile communication system. By placing a call to a required service number, a mobile subscriber is able to order a selected service announcement to be delivered to the display of the mobile station, for example. These individual services may include weather forecast, traffic announcements, local news and other local services, such as taxi information, automobile service station announcements, mass transportation announcements and schedule information and various other commercial service announcements where the mobile subscriber seeks the desired announcement on the basis of the subscriber's current geographical location. The mobile subscriber generally desires to have the service announcement related to the subscriber's current location which varies due to the mobile nature of the mobile subscriber.
FIG. 1 shows a simplified block diagram of the pan-European GSM mobile communication system. It will be understood that this is only an example of a GSM network. The mobile station MS is connected via the radio path to one of the base transceiver stations BTS, such as the base station BTS1 in FIG. 1. The base station system BSS comprises a base station controller BSC and base stations BTS controlled by the BSC. Usually several base station controllers are controlled by a mobile services switching center MSC. The mobile services switching center is connected to other mobile services switching centers.
The GSM is connected to other networks through a gateway mobile services switching center GMSC, such as the public switched telephone network PSTN, to a public land mobile network PLMN, to an integrated services data network ISDN or to a service center SC, such as the short message service center SMSC. The operation and maintenance center OMC monitors the operation of the entire system. The subscriber data of the mobile station MS is stored permanently in a home location register HLR and temporarily in a visitor location register VLR in the area of which the mobile station MS is located at a particular time. The location information of the mobile station MS is stored in the visitor location register VLR. The geographical area monitored by the visitor location register is divided into one or more location areas LA. One or more base stations BTS can operate in each location area.
The base stations BTS continuously broadcast information on a broadcast channel concerning themselves and their environment, such as a base station identity code BSIC, adjacent cell information and a location area identifier LAI broadcast on a paging channel. The cell broadcast center situated at the base station controller BSC, for example, manages the messages of the cell broadcast channels of the base stations BTS. The cell broadcast center transmits via the base station controller BSC the broadcast messages assigned for each individual base station BTS on the basis of initial information supplied by the operator. The broadcast on paging channels and cell broadcast channels, for example, has no address, is not encrypted and is intended to be received by all mobile stations MS within the geographical area covered by the transmission of the base station. The location information can then be used to solicit location based services, as more fully described in PCT Patent Document WO 98/19479.
The availability of various types of wireless communication devices produces a need to have these devices interact with each other in a manner which is cost efficient and which can be easily implemented. Such communication can occur in GSM systems using SMS wherein short messages are communicated directly between two or more terminal devices, such as mobile stations, e.g. telephones, PDAs, etc. Terminal devices can also communicate with each other using infrared signals or radio frequency (RF) signals.
Recently, low power RF systems have been proposed for providing communications between a plurality of transceivers through a short-range radio link having a broadcast range of several meters. One such local RF system is currently under development and is referred to as “Bluetooth”. This system will be commercially available in the near future and is designed to operate in the open spectrum, e.g., around 2.4 gigahertz. The Bluetooth system will allow for devices such as mobile phones, computers, and other types of terminal devices which are located within an operable range of the RF system to communicate with each other.
Such local RF communication between various types of wireless devices has been proposed through the use of information beacons. For example, in commonly-owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/612,872, such information beacons are used to store, forward and receive short messages via local wireless communication, such as Bluetooth. The information beacons are essentially wireless transceiver devices capable of communicating within an associated operating range and, in particular, with wireless communication devices or other beacons located within the associated operating range.
There are difficulties in accessing location dependent services from local RF communication systems and from SMS because the short message queries used to solicit such services information must be formulated, e.g. by depressing numerous keys on a mobile station keypad, etc. Moreover, the user will not know, until such a service request is placed, where such desired information is located, i.e. on a local RF server or on an SMS server. Thus, the user may be required to submit multiple inquiries and then select among the received transmissions, to obtain the desired information.